


Whatever's here that's left of me is yours (and oh, your love is sunlight)

by Wolf2407



Series: that's the kind of love i've been dreaming of [2]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Crowley Was Raphael Before He Fell (Good Omens), Eta Carinae, First Kiss, Fluff, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, Snake Crowley (Good Omens), The Book of Revelation chapter 6, The Carina Nebula, The Iliad in Greek, Wingfic, athens 430bc, buckle up and open a google tab folks let's get this Lore, can i get a wahoo? can i please get a wahoo?, crowley helped build a nebula and here's how, cw: the 14th century, help i became an amateur historian of athens 430bc for this monster, telepathic love confessions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-24 14:51:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19725871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wolf2407/pseuds/Wolf2407
Summary: Aziraphale has an apology to make.Crowley dreams of Greece, among other things.





	Whatever's here that's left of me is yours (and oh, your love is sunlight)

**Author's Note:**

> The working title for this was "Hello, I love you, won't you tell me your name?" but that song turned out to have a low-key creepy backstory so back to the old Hozier standby it was. This title is taken from two songs; "As it Was" and "Sunlight". 
> 
> Now with footnote links!! Click the number at the bottom to be taken back to the text.

Really, anybody would be a bit shaken up after a millennia-overdue family reunion straight out of He- _Heaven,_ that is. It was perfectly reasonable to take it a bit rough when your younger brother told you to _shut your stupid mouth and die already,_ right?  
  
They had loved each other, once.  
  
Crowley managed to stuff that rather unpleasant pile of emotions off onto the Great Mountain of Repressed Feelings for the moment and thoroughly enjoys himself at the Ritz, where the universe tilts and shifts on its axis so that its center rested somewhere in the space between himself and Aziraphale, where nothing else but them existed outside of that precious space for a few precious hours.  
  
After, though, when they’re in the backroom of the bookshop working their way through Aziraphale’s really rather extraordinary wine collection, the tension builds up somewhere in his gut until he’s nearly shaking with it, and it’s the best he can do to hold himself in the shape of a man and hope he can get properly drunk fast enough to calm himself down before something happened.  
  
That plan goes out the door when Aziraphale, hunting through his collection for their next victim, accidentally closes a cupboard door more forcefully than usual, and the sound of it startles Crowley enough that his concentration slips, and then the Great Serpent of Eden finds itself piled all askew on a rather fine and thick Persian rug.  
  
“And I was thinking-“ Aziraphale stopped short in the doorway. “...Oh.”  
  
Rather than admit anything, Crowley stared at him, flicking his tongue once. [1]  
  
“...Are you quite alright, dear?”  
  
“Perfectly fine,” Crowley answered. “Never better.” [2]  
  
Aziraphale seemed to weigh this, then decided against arguing the point. “Still drinking, then?”  
  
“If you don’t mind,” Crowley said coolly, straightening himself out and making his way to the sofa, upon which he coiled within easy reach of the side table. He reached over, his snout just barely fitting inside the wine glass, and finished off what remained. Drinking like this wasn’t as efficient as actually _lifting_ the cup, of course, which he _technically_ could have done either magically or with his tail, but it would have been an Undertaking that he just didn’t have the energy for right now.  
  
Aziraphale refilled his glass on his way to his chair, leaving the bottle on the table between them. “As I- actually, wait, hold on,” he diverged again as Crowley yawned. “How do snakes sleep with their eyes open?”  
  
“They close their retinas insstead of their eyes,” Crowley explained, resting his head on himself and tempted to do just that. “Does the job just fine.”  
  
“Interesting,” Aziraphale murmured. “Anyway...”  
  
It had been a long day. A long week. A long eleven years, actually, chasing around the wrong boy- poor kid, really, had a completely fucking nuts childhood for no reason except that things had gone haywire at the nunnery- and dreading the end of the world the whole time. Pre-mourning his plants and his car.  
  
He needed to go scold them again soon, he reminded himself as he closed his eyes- retinas, really, but that was a fine distinction- and distantly listening to Aziraphale’s chatter. He had a nice voice, and that cologne his barber had recommended _did_ smell nice. He flicked his tongue again to catch another taste of it- hints of vanilla, little bit of cherry, touch of cinnamon- and drifted off to sleep.  
  
Other snakes may dream of mice and other snakes, but Crowley dreamed of Greece.  
  
Specifically, Athens, four hundred and thirty years before the birth of the Christ-child.  
  
It had been a closed city, and besieged both inside and out. The Spartans at the gates had chased all of the people of the countryside behind the city walls, forcing it so far over capacity that people had taken to sleeping in the temples and streets, anywhere they could put a roof over their heads.  
  
It was ripe for sowing chaos in, just a breath away from turning into a mirror of Hell itself.  
  
And then the plague came.  
  
It came through the port of Piraeus, in the body of a sailor from Alexandria, and made its way up the Long Walls into Athens herself. It came without need of a Horseman to guide it, and it tore the city apart.  
  
He had worked his way into the city by insisting that Athens was prime for doing the Dark Lord’s work, that the disease would tear down people’s inhibitions and make them more susceptible to temptations. Hell had been easily convinced, and let him go.  
  
Once there, he just took credit for things the humans were already doing themselves.  
  
Crowley- well, he had been Crawly then, but that had been a name he had not chosen- had a great fondness for ancient Greece. It was one of the only places where they had the idea that snakes were symbols of wisdom and healing, and they also had quite the tolerance for animals that could speak and turn into men.  
  
Long story short, a snake walks- well, slithers into a temple. He finds a staff there that nobody can quite remember where it came from, and he coils himself around it, resting his head on the top of it. From this perch, he gives knowledge that will one day be considered trivial, but here, it saves lives.  
  
The lesser snakes in the area are, in time, drawn to him, and they come to the temple, sunning themselves freely on the floor as the acolytes step around them, letting them move freely through the temple. They keep the mice and rats away, even though they aren’t the culprits behind this.  
  
The snake-on-a-staff tells the acolytes what plants to use, of what little remains in the city. How to keep themselves clean and reduce their chances of catching disease. How to ease the passing of the ones that come to them beyond their help.  
  
At night, he descends and goes among the ill himself, through the rooms filled with the sounds of the sick and the dying, where Death is too busy to notice him. Here and there, his snout brushes the ill, and they find themselves mended.  
  
On the darkest nights, when not a soul remains awake, the snake descends from his staff and rises as a man. His hair is long and red, his _chiton_ is pale and clean, his eyes pale yellow and pupils contracting to slits in the moonlight. If you had asked him his name, he would not have given an answer.  
  
The man takes the staff in hand and walks the aisles, his free hand brushing across foreheads and through hair, old words whispered into the still air so, so quietly in case anybody was listening. On those darkest of nights, with a tempest raging in the city outside, the shade of Raphael moves among the damned and does the work he was made to do, the need for which was such an inherent part of him that it made his soul keen for the want of it.  
  
One night, he comes out into the main room of the temple, face drawn in deep thought. He raises a hand, and the wall realizes it has some stone to spare, shifting to form a deep sort of basin running the length of it. A field a few miles away finds itself suddenly bereft of just enough soil to fill that basin.  
  
He turns the soil over in his hands, little pebbles and bits of sand turning to seeds at his coaxing. Realizing the urgency of the situation, they sprout and grow in record time into a plant that would someday be known as _angelica archangelica._ Its native range was far to the north of here, but it was needed here, now, and so here it was.  
  
He remembers making it.  
  
_“So what’s this one?” Uriel had asked, peering at the little plant surrounded by light and cupped in his hands.  
  
“It’s good for fever, arthritis, plague, all sorts of things,” Raphael murmured, frowning at it. “I just can’t seem to get it quite right.”  
  
“Doesn’t it have flowers?”  
  
“Not everything needs flowers, Uri.”  
  
“How else is it supposed to reproduce?”  
  
“Through its roots? I don’t know, I haven’t gotten there yet.”  
  
“Let me see,” she said, and he had opened his hands enough for hers to slip inside, her smaller hands nestling into his larger ones the way they had countless times before and countless times since, the backs of her fingers pressed featherlight into his palms.  
  
Her brow furrowed. “Oh, that _is _a tricky one, isn’t it?”  
  
“See, it’s not just me.”  
  
“Let’s try...” She squinted slightly, and the plant changed in their shared light, its leaves turning finer with little serrations along their edges, the stems thinner and more elegant, bearing a round cluster of tiny yellow-green flowers at their tops.  
  
“I like that better, nothing too ostentatious, either,” Uriel said, and he nodded in agreement.  
  
“I think that’s it. Shall we?”  
  
_They had breathed life into it together.  
  
He traced his hand over the flowers, and then went back among the dying.  
  
The temple, in time, turned itself into a sanctuary of sorts. Some of the orphans came in from the city outside, and found solace there, in the way that their grief was soothed and their dreams calmed and turned sweet again if they slept inside the bounds of those walls.  
  
On another dark night, trouble came, although not of the divine or damned sort.  
  
A group of men came to the doorway in the dead of night, which really was just awfully cliché. Crowley met them at the door (on two legs instead of none), as demons had a way of sensing evil when it rode, and it was here.  
  
There are three kinds of people who turn to theft and murder in times of crisis. Firstly, there are those who were scoundrels even in peacetime, and had already decided the rules of society did not apply to them. Secondly, there were those that were honest men who were kept honest by easy times- most locks only keep honest men honest, after all- but took easily to dishonesty when the hour came that they could get away with it. The third kind were those that stayed good until forced to become otherwise, when they had no choice, in the way most parents would find themselves thieves or murderers the moment their children’s lives depended on it.  
  
The six men at the door seemed more like the first and second type.  
  
“We don’t want blood,” the one in front said, seemingly surprised at being confronted at all. “Just silver and gold.”  
  
“And you’ll get neither,” Crowley said, leaning his shoulder into the side of the entryway. _“Leave.”_  
  
“We don’t want blood,” the one in front repeated, drawing a knife. “But we’ll have it if you force it upon us.”  
  
Crowley tilted his head. “Is that so?” They smelled of blood already. How many houses and temples had they already visited?  
  
Crowley-the-man fell, and Crowley-the-Serpent rose. [3]  
  
“I won’t asssk again,” Crowley said as he reared up higher than they stood and bared his fangs. “Leave this place and never return, else _I_ will take _my_ blood price and the Graces will sing of your fates to herald the end of the world.”  
  
The one in front dropped his knife, his hand shaking. They all reeked of fear as they ran, whispering of enraged gods.  
  
Time passed. Faces passed. Crowley attended Pericles’ death and Aspasia’s salons. People came, either walking or dragged; he could not heal them all, could not steal so many from under Death’s scythe without drawing attention, but he did what he could, and the acolytes stood unharmed. The children gathered in the recesses of the temple, and would pester him now and then to tell them his true name, calling out guesses and mobbing him at his perch on the staff.  
  
“Pallas Athene in the form of a great snake,” a young girl said.  
  
Crowley flicked his tongue at her. “No.”  
  
“The Python of Delphi,” said another.  
  
Crowley looked at her. “Have I given a _single_ prophecy?”  
  
“...no.”  
  
“Then no.”  
  
“Aesclepius the Healer come again, wearing the skin of his favorite serpent,” called one of the older boys further in the back.  
  
Crowley flicked his tongue again, tasted the anticipation in the air. “...Perhaps.”  
  
_Aesclepeion,_ this snake-filled temple would be called, and so would its copies across Greece. They would keep the snakes in the temple, and they would treat any who came, no matter their status. As for this one...  
  
Eventually, the Spartans left, in fear of both the funeral pyres inside Athens as much as a slave riot at home. The plague tore apart the city such that ships feared to dock in the harbor. Men turned their backs on their gods and their families and no longer feared the rule of law, as they did not believe they would live long enough to see out the consequences of their behavior.  
  
But all things pass. The plague eventually subsided. Those who lived picked up the pieces.  
  
There is a sense that demons have, in the way that prey know when the predator is watching them. It doesn’t often register on other demons, but they can sense angels the way- well, the way a snake senses the hawk watching it.  
  
It is a fine and clear day when Crowley senses an indisputable Grace ring through the city as an angel enters.  
  
He slipped from the staff and strode forth on two legs, his _chiton_ turning black and hooded with a thought. “I must go,” he told the nearest acolyte, who looked at him wide-eyed and mournful.  
  
“Of course, o Lord,” the acolyte murmurs. “Will you be needing anything for your journey?”  
  
“I expect not.” He looked around. “I would also expect-“ here he’s speaking in a whisper-shout that somehow carries through the whole temple- “that nobody here would give any identifying details about me to any strangers who come asking.”  
  
“Of course not,” the acolyte vows, and steps back. “Farewell. May fortune smile upon you.”  
  
“You too,” Crowley answers quickly, and leaves.  
  
The plague returns to Athens the next winter.  
  
He does not.  
  
He never does find out what happened to that temple.  
  
He’s in Ujjain when he receives a commendation- by mystically-appearing scroll, as radio hadn’t been invented yet- for the death of Pericles and the ensuing chaos. He burns the scroll and leaves that city, too, just for a night, to go upriver until he can’t hear the city anymore and he can just _think._  
  
Eta Carinae twinkles overhead, surrounded by a red shimmer dyed from one of his own feathers, the glory of her nebula yet undiscovered by humans. [4] It had taken all four of them to make it. Helel had looked glorious as he’d wrestled with the cosmos to bring Eta Carinae into existence, his silver eyes glowing and light shining off of all the colors in his wings...  
  
How strangely fate had turned, that for him to do the thing that his soul cried out for had to be hidden like something shameful, and to do the opposite of that was praised. To be thrown down into the deepest pit and be locked away from the stars and creations he had forged and so deeply loved.  
  
“Why did you make me for a purpose that I could never fill?” he asks the stars, and they do not answer. She never has, She never will. She had cast him out and stripped him of his Grace and Her Love for asking questions, after all.  
  
He slammed his wings into the water, blotting out the sky’s reflection.  
  
_I could have saved almost all of them. I could have saved the city, stopped the war twenty years early, saved tens of thousands of lives._  
  
One day he will stand before the cross as the nails are driven through the Christ-child’s _(and he_ had _been a child; what was thirty-something years to millennia?)_ flesh, and Crowley will hear his screams as the crucifix is raised. His hands will itch to draw away the pain, to close wounds, and he will be powerless to help.  
  
(He does his best to not decide if he only imagines the man’s eyes drifting towards him, sensing his anguish, and even in the depth of his pain whispering absolution.)  
  
One day he will stand in England, spring of 1315, watching the rains come and come and come and never end, and in the depth of the worst storm he will nearly, nearly hear the whisper of Uriel’s voice as she sings the fury into the skies and her song trembles with sorrow for what she has wrought. The rain makes the crops fail. All across Europe, the Great Famine came, and in its shadow a man rides forth on a dark horse. In his wake, people ate the seeds they needed to save for planting, slaughtered their draft animals, chased their children into the forest so that they didn’t have to watch them die, and in their uttermost despair consumed the flesh of their fellow man.  
  
_A quart of wheat for a denarius, but do not harm the oil and wine._  
  
And then came the pale rider bearing a bow, down along the Silk Road, and out of the prints his horse leaves upon the earth spring flea-ridden rats. (Hell did not send the plague; Beelzebub had made that quite clear, that they had no control over it but were to capitalize on it as much as they could.) The famine had weakened the people, and left them ripe for the reaping by the disease borne by the fleas.  
  
Then comes the red rider, swordless yet, her hair redder than the coat of her steed, her cloak dyed with blood. Those who look upon her do not fear her, but love her. She whispers in the ears of kings and peasants alike, and foments revolt and war.  
  
_And power was given to her to take the peace from the earth, that they should kill one another._  
  
Death does not come; he was already here. In his wake, Hell followed him, and the angels came after them.  
  
He watches in the South of France as four people die for every one that lives, as the crops fail and the livestock are struck dead and the little children are abandoned to wolves or drowned or _eaten-_  
  
and he cannot do nothing.  
  
It lasts a week. A week of picking out one person in fifteen, in twenty, so that it is not too obvious. Even that is so many he barely has time to sit, his hands always busy, always full, chanting blessings and healing prayers without so much as a contract for a soul. The rooms full of deathbeds are so dark for the want of candles that he can make his pupils wide enough to look human without the light destroying his retinas and giving him a headache.  
  
“Might I have a name, sire, that I may say in my prayers for God to bless you?” one of the men he heals asks on his way out.  
  
“C-“ no, not Crowley, Beelzebub would have him whipped for a century- “R-“ no, not Raphael, that would be _worse,_ Satan would force him to spend five centuries in boiling sulphur for not revealing himself and making his full power available to him.  
  
“-it is God who heals,” Crowley spits, turning away. “My name is unimportant.” _It is God who brought this plague and fashioned a healer who would not be allowed to heal._  
  
“They say the Archangel Raphael’s back,” Aziraphale says when they meet outside of London, and Crowley’s blood turns to ice. He professes ignorance, of course, pretending to be completely blind and deaf and not having noticed the presence of an archangel despite the fact that as a supposedly average demon, the raw power of Raphael’s Grace would have felt like fire. Shit, he can sense Gabriel all the way over in Moscow even sitting here.  
  
“Is there any word Upstairs on who sent the plague?” Crowley asks casually, toying with his goblet. _Do not harm the oil and wine._  
  
“None,” Aziraphale sighs. “I’m sure you know Pestilence was seen at the start of it, but I don’t have any idea who told him to come.”  
  
Crowley takes a drink. Oh, he has fucking _ideas,_ all right. If Uriel hadn’t wanted to send the storms, there were only two- well, three, if you counted the Metatron- people who could have forced her hand. Only one of them had an actual physical form, and that physical form was in Moscow at this exact moment.  
  
“But surely...” Aziraphale’s tongue flicks over his lips nervously as he glances around, at the thin, haggard faces, at the stench of funeral pyres in the air. “...surely, if it’s all part of the Her Plan, it’ll all work out alright in the end, won’t it?”  
  
The Ineffable Plan had come about at the end of the War, when She said that Her reasons for allowing the Fall and the cleaving of the Host were... well, ineffable. Thus, Raphael was never privy to it, but it seems like the only thing she ever told anybody was the _Great_ Plan and it was unclear if they were the same thing. It had not yet been six thousand years. The end was not yet nigh.  
  
And yet...  
  
“Surely, it can’t be that bad, can it?” Aziraphale fretted.  
  
_And it was heard as the noise of thunder, the Great Beast said-_  
  
“Come and see, angel,” Crowley murmured, standing.  
  
_They will suffer. They will hurt, and be hurt. They will need a healer._  
  
Once, that had been enough.  
  
_Mother, I would seek an audience.  
  
Come, then, Beloved._  
  
Had She ever actually loved him, or had it all been a lie, even when they sang together forging the stars?  
  
_I know they must struggle, and I know they must be tested. I know they must have something to fight against in order to prove themselves, and I know there will be blood. But why must they die? Why must they all be destroyed?_  
  
_It is written.  
  
_By whom, exactly? Where?  
  
_But why? Can you not rewrite it? Must they end in fire and flame? Surely, not all of them will deserve it, could you not find some of Your mercy for them-_  
  
_IT IS NOT YOUR PLACE TO QUESTION!_  
  
The floor had gone out from under his feet.  
  
She had made him as the patron of compassion and then cast him out for filling that role.  
  
_So shut your stupid mouth, and die already._  
  
There was a hand on his throat.  
  
There was a hand on his actual, corporeal throat, and the Grace was so strong he could taste it, like lilies and lightning.  
  
He thinks: _Gabriel,_ and opens his mouth to strike-  
  
Aziraphale’s scent washes over him.  
  
He closes his mouth, opens his eyes, and flicks his tongue quite tamely.  
  
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” Aziraphale says, holding up his hands. “I just... you looked cold, and I thought you might be warmer somewhere else? You’re welcome here, of course, I think I might have a heating pad somewhere if you want it?”  
  
Crowley, still awash in angelic Grace, cannot help but think of Heaven, of stark empty halls and bright shining walls, of _shut your stupid mouth and die already,_ of hate in eyes that had once held love and adoration.  
  
He suddenly feels very alone, and very, very small, like a once-favorite toy thrown in the garbage.  
  
He reaches out, sniffing once or twice at Aziraphale’s hand, just a touch sluggish- he _was_ cold- and Aziraphale rotated his hand uncertainly, the way one might when presenting it to a dog.  
  
Before his nerves could desert him, Crowley lunged, twining himself up Aziraphale’s arm and pulling himself up, draping his neck over the shoulders and letting the rest of himself drop down to wrap around the angel’s torso, the end of his tail resting on the floor. He brings his head around, pressing it to the front of Aziraphale’s throat and the top of his head briefly brushing the angel’s jaw, and-  
  
oh.  
  
_oh.  
  
**oh.**_  
  
Angels carried love with them everywhere they went; of course they did, they were angels, _made_ for it, to love Her and Her Creation. This was _more._ This was like being was in the Host-  
  
No. No. It was _more._  
  
He could feel it, like the deepest and most profound of Truths, surer than the sunrise, bright and warm as sunlight in spring, as glorious as a fresh-forged nebula, as deep as the universe itself. _This_ was what unconditional love felt like, and it made what he had felt in the Host look like a pale shadow. This was the sort of thing that levelled cities, broke open worlds, changed realities-  
  
he trembles before it, before Aziraphale, so bright and yet not painfully so, so warm in the spots where their souls are intermingling, Crowley’s wrought bare by the snake-form and raw exhaustion. Aziraphale radiates compassion and sympathy and adoration and, and, and-  
  
It is the first love he has felt since the Fall.  
  
_“Sstay,”_ Crowley prays, pressing the top of his head into Aziraphale’s jaw, closing his eyes (retinas, fine distinction again) and he is thankful snakes cannot weep.  
  
“Of course, my dear,” Aziraphale whispers, and there’s a blush of warmth as his fingers trace along Crowley’s jaw; he rolls his head slightly, leans into it, tries to mirror even a part of the depth of that love-  
  
“I know,” Aziraphale says simply, as Crowley shifts himself so that the angel can sit without crushing him.  
  
Crowley rearranges himself a bit more, so that Aziraphale could lean back on the sofa arm if he was so inclined, presses his head back into the hollow of the angel’s throat, and waits for the unspoken words. In a different world, he might have spent a century on a different continent instead of partaking in this conversation. But this is a new reality, freshly reshaped by the Antichrist-that-Wasn’t-Really-That-Bad-After-All (...was Adam technically his nephew?), and it is full of new possibilities.  
  
“Thank you for waiting,” Aziraphale murmurs, the words soft and reverent as he lightly strokes the ridge of scales above Crowley’s right eye. “I... I’m sorry it took me so long. It must have been difficult.”  
  
_You go too fast for me, Crowley._  
  
He raises his head, gently nuzzling Aziraphale’s cheek, making a soft shushing sound. “No trouble at all, angel.” _Not for you._  
  
_Perhaps someday we could... have a picnic, dine at the Ritz._ Perhaps the Ritz had been their pomegranate.  
  
“Oh,” Aziraphale says, and Crowley feels his skin warm. “Thank you.”  
  
And then, because he _knows_ Crowley, and Crowley has fallen asleep in the bookshop before, he asks: “Would you prefer quiet, or a bit of noise?”  
  
“Bit of noise might be nice,” Crowley suggests, because when the silence gets too deep he can almost hear flames gutting the bookshop again.  
  
Aziraphale hums thoughtfully, leaning back so his shoulders are pressed against the arm of the sofa. Crowley presses their cheeks together one last time, then sets his head on the angel’s chest, the edge of his jaw resting on a collarbone. “Any suggestions?”  
  
“Ssomething Greek,” Crowley proposed. “I rather liked ancient Greece.”  
  
Aziraphale nods, and raises a hand. A rather ancient tome nearby suddenly realizes it should be somewhere else, and fits itself neatly in his grip.  
  
He takes a moment, before he opens the book, to brush his free hand along Crowley’s face one more time.  
  
“Sleep well,” Aziraphale bids him, and it’s more like a blessing than a suggestion. Crowley, at that moment, cannot muster the ire to argue.  
  
There is the soft creaking squeak of old leather, the smell of very old papyrus, as Aziraphale delicately rustles through pages, and begins to read.  
  
_“Mênin aeide thea Pêlêïadeô Achilêos,  
oulomenên, hê muri' Achaiois alge' ethêke,_  
_pollas d' iphthimous psuchas Aïdi proïapsen_  
_hêrôôn, autous de helôria teuche kunessin  
oiônoisi te pasi, Dios d' eteleieto boulê_  
_ex hou dê ta prôta diastêtên erisante_  
_Atreïdês te anax andrôn kai dios Achilleus.”_  
  
_What God was it then that set them together in bitter collision, indeed,_ Crowley thought, and was asleep before Aziraphale finished reading the line.

_(Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles,  
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,  
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls  
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting  
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished  
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict  
Atreus’ son the lord of men and brilliant Achilles.)  
[Crowley ‘says’ the eighth line; Aziraphale does not.]  
_-The _Iliad,_ Homer, Book One, Lines 1-8.

_**_  
  
He does sleep well. It’s a deep, dreamless sleep, thoroughly restful, and just the sort he needed.  
  
He drifts back into consciousness, pleasantly warm, a calm and slow heartbeat thrumming under his jaw. He flicks his tongue, the tip of it touching the corner of Aziraphale’s jaw.  
  
“Hello, dear,” Aziraphale says warmly, and there’s the soft _thud_ of a book being set on the table as he watches Crowley’s eyes dilate and re-focus as his retinas reopen. He waits as Crowley yawns, fangs on full display, then strokes the underside of the snake’s jaw with the backs of his fingers, ever so lightly.  
  
Crowley leans into it, and thinks he could stay there for half an eternity, but Aziraphale _would_ eventually have to pay taxes and such or they would get evicted, and that would just be more trouble than it was worth.  
  
Thus, however reluctantly, he lifts his head, untangling himself from Aziraphale as he drops onto the floor, waiting until he’s entirely coiled in one neat little pile in the middle of the room before taking a breath and forcing the snake into the shape of a man.  
  
“You know,” Crowley said, cracking his neck and rolling his shoulders, “Even after all this time, I _still_ sometimes think I’m going to forget how to do that.”  
  
Ah, he’d fucked up the jaw again. He pressed his hand to it, fusing the bone into the proper shape.  
  
“Isn’t it like changing into an Aspect?” Aziraphale asked, moving over so that there was room for two people on the sofa instead of a person and a snake; Crowley indelicately fell into the empty space.  
  
The idea of being physically apart felt... _wrong,_ now, considering what had happened the last time he’d been awake, which he wasn’t sure just _how_ to talk about.  
  
“No, not at all,” he said, and yawned again. “It’s like... it’s like forcing a snake to be a person. Don’t really know how else to describe it. There’s so many extra bones to keep track of, it’s mind-boggling. You ever tried to turn an extra pair of ribs and a vertebra into a pair of legs?”  
  
“Can’t say I have,” Aziraphale mused, sitting up more straight and proper. “All of my Aspects just... happen, I guess. I don’t have to think much more about it than which one I want.”  
  
“It was like that for me, too.” _Once._ He leaned back, sprawling out, flexing his fingers and other new-made joints to make sure they were at least serviceable, if not necessarily anatomically plausible. “How long was I out for?”  
  
“Including the first time, about a week,” Aziraphale said mildly, bending forward to pick up the book on the table again- an accounting of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt in... Middle Egyptian, looked like. “You seemed to need it.”  
  
“I did,” Crowley sighed, leaning his head back and closing his eyes again. “Felt all... drawn out and stretched thin, even after a spin through hellfire.”  
  
“Better now, though?”  
  
“Yeah.” He smiles, just a bit. “Better.”  
  
There’s something eating at Aziraphale. They sit for a while in companionable silence, but his fingers dance along the edges of the pages, and he collects his breath to say something only to let go of it several times. Crowley’s on the verge of telling him _spit it out, angel_ when he does just that.  
  
“There’s something I need to apologize to you for,” Aziraphale says hurriedly, setting down the Egyptian text and clasping his hands tightly in his lap. “Several somethings, actually.”  
  
Crowley opened his eyes, raised his eyebrows. “Can’t imagine what.”  
  
“I didn’t realize- when I asked, assumed, that you would kill the Antichrist, what I- was really asking. In light of... who you were. Who you had once been. Before. And for that, I cannot apologize enough. I hope that you can forgive me.”  
  
Oh, he’s awake now.  
  
He leans forward slowly, interlacing his fingers and bracing his elbows on his knees, resting his chin on his hands. “And that would be?”  
  
“You don’t need to worry, it’s not like I’m going to tell Gabriel,” Aziraphale said, scoffing slightly, more than slightly unnerved and already partly regretting saying anything at all. “I was-“  
  
_“Who are you referring to?”  
_  
“Good _lord,_ Crowley, it might take me a while to catch up on some things, but I’m not _stupid._ I know there’s only one missing Archangel. I...”  
  
“You what?” It comes out harsher than he meant for it to.  
  
“I saw your wings,” Aziraphale confesses. “When we... when we swapped, I saw them, because I was trying to get a feel for them because I knew they were a bit different shape than mine and I thought it would be unbecoming for me to look awkward in your body if I had to use them, and... and I didn’t realize they had to be forced black, it wore off as soon as I brought them out, and there were four of them because I didn’t know you had to specifically hide the bottom ones by putting them in a different plane than normal, and I- I would have appreciated a warning, thank you very much!”  
  
“Did you have an overpowering urge to turn into a snake, by any chance?”  
  
“Did I- _no!_ And don’t change the subject!”  
  
“Just wondering,” Crowley said coolly. “’Cause it went away for me, when I was running around in your vessel. Anyway, you can say the name.”  
  
“But it’s not _your_ name, anymore, is it?”  
  
“No.” Crowley suddenly wished for something to drink. “Hasn’t been for a long time. The one who it was Given to died when he Fell and emerged from the boiling brimstone trapped in a corrupted version of his favorite Aspect. He died when She locked him away from the stars he had lit with his breath and dyed with his own feathers, the ones that he’d so _dearly_ loved, when She stripped his Grace from him and didn’t even have the decency to tell his siblings what She’d done-“  
  
He took a sharp breath.  
  
“Anyway. You can say the name.”  
  
“But do you actually _want_ me to?”  
  
Crowley made a noncommittal noise and shrugged.  
  
_“Raphael,”_ Aziraphale pronounced. “The archangel of healing, compassion, and music.”  
  
“And of knowledge and progress,” Crowley added quietly. “Everybody forgets that bit.”  
  
“I’m so-“  
  
“All I did was ask Her why they had to suffer,” Crowley continued, pressing his lips to his knuckles, and Aziraphale’s mouth snapped shut. “I couldn’t understand why we had put so much time and effort into Creation, only to throw it away in six thousand years. Why the humans had to find an end in fire even if they had done nothing wrong. I never directly challenged Her. I never questioned Her in front of the others. And She still cast me out, locked me away where I couldn’t see the sky or hear the birds or watch the plants grow. She made me to be the Great Healer of the Host and then She made it so that I could never fulfill that purpose but would feel the need for it, that I had to watch every major famine and plague sweep through humanity and watch Death take the ones I could have saved, watch all the children waste away and drown and die because _I couldn’t do anything._ ”  
  
Aziraphale laid a hand on his knee. “I’m so, so sorry.”  
  
“I used to think it would have been better if I had never left the Host, if I had just kept my mouth shut, and been allowed to be on Earth as myself. And then I saw how the Archangels never came to ground, and I saw how they only let you perform a single healing miracle in an entire dying city, and I think I would have gone insane up there. I really would have.”  
  
“I didn’t realize what I was saying, when I wished for you to return to the Host at the bandstand. I thought it was the only way we could be together. I couldn’t see any other way.”  
  
“I was _trying_ to _show you_ one, angel. It’s a big universe. There’s whole parts of it nobody but me’s ever seen.”  
  
There was a soft sound as Aziraphale’s breath caught in his throat, a question dying unspoken.  
  
Crowley turned his head slightly, the corner of his mouth resting against his fingers as he looked over. “Go ahead, shoot.”  
  
“What was it like, lighting the stars?”  
  
Crowley’s eyebrows went up, then down. He looked away again.  
  
“If you don’t want to say, that’s-“  
  
“I’m thinking,” Crowley interrupted. “I... I don’t think it’s _possible_ to put into words. I don’t think I _can_ tell you.”  
  
“Oh, that’s-“  
  
“But I can show you,” Crowley said, offering an open hand and meeting Aziraphale’s eyes. “If you want, that is.”  
  
He tilted his head, smiling slightly as Aziraphale considered him with wide eyes. “Tempt you to knowing how the stars were forged, angel?”  
  
“Oh,” Aziraphale says quietly, looking at his hand. He took it, and met Crowley’s gaze. “Temptation accomplished.”  
  
Something bright flared to life in his chest at the angel’s touch. It promptly got thrown onto the Great Mountain of Repressed Feelings.  
  
Crowley closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and focused. Sharing memories had been trivial for _angels,_ once, before there had been so many of them that to be a hivemind was to stand in a hurricane. Language developed, and then people began appreciating privacy and the ability to put a spin on things, but sometimes, the old way really _was_ best-  
  
He opened his eyes, except they were no longer his.  
  
_This is the Carina Nebula, or it will be,_ Crowley explained. A silver shimmer threaded through the dark sky ahead of them, thousands of silver specks nestled behind it. Here and there, blue threaded its way into the silver, complemented on the opposite side by a streak of topaz, a blush of rose or orange.  
  
_Isn’t the Carina Nebula mostly red from a distance?_ Aziraphale asked.  
  
_Just wait._  
  
Raphael looked up, his eyes following the blue as it deepened to sapphire. He beat his wings once, stardust swirling around his face, and squinted slightly as he tried to see the overall pattern.  
  
Another flash of the wings; one set above, one set below, affixed just above his hips. The uppers glimmered with bands and whole feathers of ruby and turquoise, mixed in with the white, the starlight setting the colors shimmering.  
  
_Why turquoise?  
  
Red for blood, turquoise for healing,_ Crowley explained. _It’s a powerful stone if you know how to use it._  
  
There was a brush of another wing against his; he felt a wry twist of humor as Aziraphale startled.  
  
_Danger hadn’t been invented yet, angel. We were never safer than this._  
  
_Old habits, I suppose,_ Aziraphale muttered.  
  
Raphael’s head turned, and he smiled.  
  
“Hello, Uri,” he called warmly.  
  
_He doesn’t sound too different from you.  
  
Yet,_ Crowley pointed out. _Just wait._  
  
And there stood Uriel, her face turned up in consideration, her brow slightly furrowed. The gold on her face was nigh-silver in the starlight, and her wings shone sapphire and jade.  
  
_Sapphire for the oceans and the sky, jade for the plants we made together,_ Crowley said before Aziraphale could ask. _Lady of the Storm was her first title. The rest came later._  
  
_I see._  
  
“Being difficult, is it?” Uriel asked.  
  
“Look at the _scale_ of it,” Raphael replied. “It’s _incredible._ Where’s Helel gone off to?”  
  
_You know him better as Satan, the Dark Lord, the Great Adversary, and all that.  
  
I know what his Given name was, _Aziraphale thought stiffly.  
  
_But do you know what his first form looked like? What he lost when he Fell?_  
  
_No.  
  
Oh, you’re in for a treat._  
  
“Off with Gabriel, over there,” Uriel pointed at the lower-left quadrant of the nebula, where a light twinkled nebulously. “He’s had to split that star he was working on to get the brightness he wanted. Gabriel said he’s nearly done with it.”  
  
_The aesclepeions, were those you?  
  
Yes.  
  
I thought all those snakes were odd._  
  
Raphael hummed thoughtfully, looking back to the main nebula. “I’ve been trying to figure this out,” he said, gesturing at the general, pre-formed mess before them. “I think I’ve nearly got it, but...”  
  
“But?”  
  
He turned back to her. “Kingdom for a feather, sister?” he asked, a wry grin turning the corner of his mouth.  
  
_That was our running joke. With all She spent going on about the Kingdoms of Men... Helel started it when he asked me for one of mine to color the Crab Nebula with. We figured out how to dye them with feathers before he came up with it, of course, but..._  
  
_It was just something nice,_ Aziraphale thought, the understanding and the sympathy radiating from him like starlight.  
  
_Yeah. It was._  
  
“Of course,” Uriel replied easily, turning and offering her wing.  
  
_What, just like that?_ Aziraphale cried out.  
  
_Just like that,_ Crowley thought back. _Remember, danger hadn’t been invented yet._  
  
Raphael’s fingers carded through her wing, and found what they were looking for: a covert colored in pure sapphire. Uriel didn’t so much as flinch when he pulled it.  
  
“Thank you,” Raphael said as she pulled her wing back and tucked it against her shoulders. He brought his own around, looking for a suitable match for the one in his hand.  
  
_You loved her,_ Aziraphale thought, and they were both slightly taken aback by the fact he’d actually said it. He hadn’t meant to, but there were no secrets when you communicated telepathically like this. It was the main reason it had fallen out of style. _And she loved you. More than angels normally love each other.  
  
Not as much as you,_ Crowley thought before he could stop himself, and they both managed to do a metaphysical double-take.  
  
_She was my favorite, of all of them, when we were just the Four,_ he explained hurriedly. _Helel was the First and always slightly apart from the rest of us; the time he spent alone with Her changed him, gave him things the rest of us never had. Gabriel and I were always different, but we were close. Uriel, though..._  
  
He took a moment to collect himself. Sympathy washed over him, a warm thing backlit by Aziraphale’s love.  
  
_Helel was the first to figure out how to create things, and he taught me. Then I taught Gabriel and Uriel. She was the only one who loved Creation as much as I did._  
  
_I’m sorry.  
  
You don’t need to be,_ Crowley reassured him. _Anyway, let me show you this._  
  
Raphael plucked a larger ruby covert from his own wing and held the two feathers in his hands. He closed them and opened them again, and there laid a pile of loosely intermingling ruby-and-sapphire dust.  
  
He brought his hands up to his face and blew the dust out into the cosmos, with a wingbeat or two to help it settle out.  
  
“Oh,” Uriel gasped.  
  
_Oh,_ thought Aziraphale, stunned.  
  
Raphael grinned, and Crowley felt smug.  
  
Off to the upper right was deep red, meshing in with the pale light in the middle and reaching across it, flaring off to the sides. In the lower left, deep blue coiled around Helel’s proto-star, roiling in on itself and reaching out to the red. Outside of those two areas of influence, they suffused into a rich color that was more blue than red, but not quite purple. [5]  
  
_And that’s why the Carina Nebula looks red from a distance, angel._  
  
_Oh, Crowley,_ Aziraphale marveled.  
  
_I wanted to show you all of this,_ Crowley told him. _I wanted to show you the stars, take you to Alpha Centauri, show you all the things I made out here. I thought if I did, maybe you could see that... that I was more than just a demon, once. That part of him was still part of me and maybe, if you couldn’t love the part of me that belonged to Hell, maybe you could love this-_  
  
_You were never just a demon,_ Aziraphale cut in firmly. _Never.  
  
Whatever of him that’s left in me is yours,_ Crowley pleaded, supplicant. _His Grace is gone and he Fell, but-_  
  
_I fell in love with Crowley, not Raphael. I love your black wings, I think they suit you. I love your snake-eyes, and the hiss you get when you’re tired or distracted. I love the way your scales shine in moonlight and the way your jaw moves when you yawn and how your teeth get sharp when you’re furious and I love how you move so differently from having to manually put your bones together and I will tell you these things and more every day until the end of eternity if that is how long it takes for you to believe me. This man, this Archangel, is a stranger to me. I do not know him._  
  
There was a movement, deep in Crowley’s soul, not unlike a still pond disturbed by a thrown stone. It rippled out through his entire being, everything ever so slightly changed in its wake. _  
  
...you like my eyes? Really?_  
  
_They’re very unique. Very expressive, even behind those sunglasses, which you don’t really need to wear when it’s just us, by the way, dear._  
  
Crowley did not reply.  
  
_Is that Eta Carinae Helel’s working on, then?_ Aziraphale asked, throwing him a lifeline. Crowley grabbed it like a man drowning.  
  
_It is. Do you want to skip straight there?  
  
I can wait. It’s not like we’re pressed for time, are we?  
  
No, _Crowley thought with an odd warmth. _No, we’re not._  
  
Raphael flicked his wings again, gold and silver stardust swirling at his wingtips. With another sweeping wingbeat, the Carina Nebula was painted with the seeds of stars.  
  
“That’s _glorious,”_ Uriel whispered.  
  
_It really is,_ Aziraphale agreed.  
  
“Thank you,” said Raphael, while Crowley indulged in the vice of pride. “Shall we go see if Gabriel’s noticed yet?”  
  
Uriel rolled her eyes as she spread her wings. “I don’t think he’d notice much less than a star forming itself around him.”  
  
_Always dreadfully unobservant,_ Crowley mused. _Even as a fledgling, dreadfully unobservant._  
  
_You were older than him?  
  
I was. First came Helel, then me, then Gabriel, then Uriel. We weren’t separated by very long- a blink, in the terms of the rest of our lifespans- but those moments were critically important.  
  
_The new red of the nebula brought out the red in his wings rather nicely, the blue making the turquoise shine. It did not take long for them to land near Gabriel, whose wings were half-outstretched, nearly defensive, topaz glimmering and amethyst washed out by the overpowering white-gold glow.  
  
_Topaz for old paper and parchment, because he was made to be her Messenger. Amethyst for clarity of mind._  
  
_But not clarity of sight?  
  
No, though he certainly could have used it.  
  
_Gabriel’s eyes were paler then, when they had been shaping the stars. They had been a nice, even lilac, glinting with twilights-that-would-be.  
  
Crowley had nearly not recognized them in Heaven, full of the rich purple of nebulae colored with his own amethyst feathers, dotted and shimmering with starlight.  
  
“He’s nearly got it, I think,” Gabriel breathed.  
  
_He's changed so much since then,_ Crowley thought with no small measure of grief. _So much. The seeds of who he is now were there, of course, but... he was kinder, then. Gentler. Sometimes I wonder if he became the way he is because of how alone he was after the War. It left him as the new eldest Archangel, and... maybe it broke him, and that’s why he wears nebulae in his eyes now, to remind them all he was there when the greatest stars were forged, that he claimed the titles that belonged to Helel. Maybe it was put on him too early, when he still had so much left to learn, because he was the one left behind. He and Uriel were never particularly close.  
  
That wasn’t your fault. You weren’t responsible for him.  
  
But I was. I taught him how to form space and time and breathe life. He looked up to me, respected me, loved me. And I left him behind.  
  
I’m sorry,_ Aziraphale said, because there wasn’t much else _to_ say.  
  
Raphael turned, and there stood Helel.  
  
His wings were fully spread, resplendent in the light that radiated from him, _of_ him. His hair was the black of starless sky, dappled here and there with the silver-and-gold of starlight. His wings were patterned and banded with silver and spessartine[6], dappled with gold.  
  
_Silver, for he was the Bringer of Light and the Morningstar before he Fell. Spessartine, for the fire he was given mastery of even before he was Lord of a whole domain of it. He was the only one of us with gold in his wings.  
  
They were magnificent,_ Aziraphale said, and there was a note of sorrow. _There’s nothing left in the Host quite like that.  
  
He was Her favorite, Her very first creation._  
  
And before the Morningstar, there hung Eta Carinae, as yet an undefined mass of light.  
  
“Raphael,” Helel called without turning, “a kingdom for a feather, brother?”  
  
Uriel raised her eyebrows as he walked forth.  
  
“You could have called for me earlier, if you were waiting,” Raphael said once he drew abreast of Helel, offering his other, unplucked wing.  
  
“I was having far too much fun,” Helel disagreed, taking a small, solid-turquoise feather without looking for it. His other arm was outstretched in the shadow of his wing. “This one delights me.”  
  
He cast the dust into the light, and with one final, sweeping wingbeat of shimmering silver and spessartine that Raphael stepped aside to make space for, it resolved itself into not one star but two, burning painfully bright, with just a barest blush of blue.  
  
_He always made his stars too bright._  
  
“Give it a few thousand years,” Helel said. “Then it’ll be even better.”[7]  
  
Helel turned to face him, finally, and he was _radiant._ His silver eyes glowed, his skin glimmering, the hard angles of his face casting shadows on itself.  
  
_He was beautiful,_ thought Aziraphale.  
  
_He was._  
  
Raphael turned, catching a passing cluster of stardust in his hand, twining it around his fingers.  
  
“And yet there remains work to be done,” he murmured, holding it up for Helel to see, and stepping back.  
  
_We were always wary of him. He was different._  
  
He hummed under his breath, a little melody that grew as he walked back towards Uriel. By the time he reached her, it was a soft song, and she joined in.  
  
It grew between them, and then Raphael _properly_ put his voice into it, ringing out on all of the planes of Reality.  
  
_I see what you mean,_ Aziraphale thought. _He had a lovely voice.  
  
It was taken from me, when I Fell.  
  
I’m very sorry._  
  
Uriel matched him, as he spun the stardust between his fingers, watching it infuse with light. Gabriel joined in, and then lastly Helel.  
  
And it was glorious, in the truest sense of the word, a reflection of Her.  
  
_Sometimes She’d join in._  
  
They sang as they returned to their work, and it was Good, their melody ringing out across the universe, through every dimension.  
  
_I think that’s what I miss the most. The singing. I can go look at the stars, but I can’t get that back. We were Four, but when we sang, it was like we were one. When She would sing with us, it was like She had never divided our souls from Her Grace._  
  
The memory slipped. He stood in a white hall, Helel’s hand on his shoulder.  
  
“Doesn’t it seem wrong, that they should suffer, when they haven’t done anything wrong?”  
  
“She says they must be tested,” Raphael recited neatly. “For them to... prove themselves worthy of Her, or something.”  
  
“But do they need to _die_ for it? All those little babies, screaming in the flames-“  
  
_“It wasn’t my idea.”_  
  
_Mother I would seek an audience  
it was not given to me to question you_  
_but must they die?  
  
IT WAS NOT-_  
  
Crowley opened his eyes and pulled his hand away.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I didn’t- you don’t need to see that. Nobody should have to experience that.”  
  
Aziraphale blinked repeatedly, still adjusting. He fixed his eyes on Crowley’s, and put his still-open hand on the left side of Crowley’s jaw.  
  
“My dear,” Aziraphale said, his voice shaking slightly, “it would be my greatest honor if someday, you showed me.” His thumb skimmed over the little snake tattooed just in front of Crowley’s ear.  
  
Crowley closed his eyes, leaning into the touch. “Someday,” he agreed tentatively, the way Aziraphale had said they would _someday_ dine at the Ritz. “But not today.”  
  
“Of course not,” Aziraphale whispered, and he was closer now, close enough to feel the warmth of his breath. He pressed his fingers ever-so-light against Crowley’s face, and he obligingly turned his head so Aziraphale could get a closer look at the snake tattoo.  
  
“Rule seems to be you have to express the beast somewhere visible on your form,” he mumbled. “Every time I tried getting rid of it altogether, whole body fell apart and left me back where I started. That was about the best workaround I could find.”  
  
“You clever, clever soul,” Aziraphale murmured, and pressed his lips to the tattoo.  
  
Something bright sparked in his chest. When Aziraphale pulled away, he turned, and met the angel’s lips with his own.  
  
When, eventually, they break apart, they each have a hand on the other’s neck and in the other’s hair.  
  
There is a warm humor in Aziraphale’s scent. “I know it’s terrible timing, but could I tempt you to a spot of lunch?”  
  
Of course he hadn’t had anything but miracled tea for almost a week. That blessed fool.  
  
“Of course,” Crowley replied, smiling as he sneaks one more quick kiss before pulling away and opening his eyes.  
  
There would be time, later, for more talks, more kissing, for the making and showing of memories.  
  
But for right now, they could get lunch. They could go for a drive. They could do anything they pleased, whenever they wanted.  
  
After all, they had all the time in the world.  
  
(and then some.)  
  
  
  
  
  
______________________________________

[1] His reasons for this were twofold: the first was that tasting scents as a snake was an entirely different way of sensing than smelling them in a humanoid form and it was nice to mix things up once in a while, and the second was that ever since he was Crowley, Crowley has been a dramatic bitch.

[2] Aziraphale quite doubted this. He could count the number of times he had witnessed Crowley lose control of his form on one hand, the most memorable of which was when they had argued the ethics of the Great Flood. That occasion was also memorable for the fact that it had been the only time he had been genuinely afraid Crowley-the-Serpent was going to bite him.

[3] Nearly twenty-five hundred years from now, after he’d held hands with an angel at the end of the world, he’d think that was something close to the story of his life.

[4] The Carina Nebula, also known as the Grand Nebula, is about 8,500 light-years from Earth, and contains many of the largest and brightest stars in the sky. It, itself, is among the largest and most diffuse nebulae in our sky, having a radius of around 230 light-years. It is the nebula that Crowley specifically says that he helped make in the scene with the astronomy book. It contains many smaller nebulae, as well as the moderately famous Eta Carinae, which is only visible south of 30° north and sent the author on a mad scramble for a city founded pre-500 BC that was south of that latitude. (The original candidate for this scene was Damascus, which sits at 33.3° north.) Ujjain, if you did not google it, is a riverside city in west-central India, a bit more in the northern part of the country than the south, in the Ujjain district of the state of Madhya Pradesh, at 23.17° north. (It is likely still there even if you did google it.)

[5] <https://www.constellation-guide.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Carina-Nebula.jpg> from <https://www.constellation-guide.com/carina-nebula/>

[6] <https://images.app.goo.gl/F7fZyKGXo5E7FLDJA> Spessartine is a type of garnet.

[7] <https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/thumbnails/image/stsci-h-p1918a-f-2000x2000.png?itok=kxDwHb7f> In an 18-year period beginning in 1827, Eta Carinae’s supernova became visible to humanity in an event termed the Great Eruption. It was, briefly, the second-brightest object in the night sky.

**Author's Note:**

> The transliteration of the Iliad was taken from the Chicago Homer, which can be found online for free in an interactive website hosted by Northwestern University, and was invaluable for not forcing the author to copy in actual Greek script. The lines should, hopefully, be rendered 1:1 to the original (as in, what you see as line 4 is the actual line 4 of the Iliad). I chose transliteration instead of actual Greek so that it could be loosely sounded out instead of hitting the eye like a brick when you're reading, and I chose the Iliad 'cause, well, it's gay. 
> 
> A sequel with the Uriel-Crowley confrontation we've all been dying for is in the works.
> 
> I would love to hear what you think, or hear questions/thoughts on the historical bits! 
> 
> A question for the philosophers: at the end of the scene with the making of Eta Carinae, how many people were present?


End file.
